Our church

For someone who’s lived in Michigan their whole life, the deciduous forests that cover the northern half of the state don’t always feel that spectacular. They’re a really lovely backdrop for hiking and camping, and you can always find some interesting creature under a rock, but they are, after all, just a bunch of trees. Oaks and maples and beeches all blend together - you can take a million pictures of the sun streaming through the leaves on a July afternoon, but eventually they all start looking the same.

If you go searching long enough, though, you'll find some geological and ecological variations in the landscape, like bogs or waterfalls or meadows. Like little treasures, you can collect them, giving them names, keeping them as secrets that you only share with friends or siblings or children.

I get to keep the secret of one such place. It’s a red pine stand, about 4.5 acres total distributed across three contiguous, rectangular plots of land. The pines are planted in neat rows, too organized to be natural. I remember passing similar stands of pines along northern Michigan highways as a child and asking my mom how they could be in such straight rows. She told me that pine stands like this had been planted across the state (and the country) in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. I remember her saying that my great grandfather was one of those men employed by the CCC, and now every time I pass a neat row of pines, I wonder if these ones might have been the ones he helped plant almost a hundred years ago.

I don’t know who owns this “secret” pine stand - the thrill of maybe-trespassing is part of what makes it so special. Its location has been passed down, not through my family, but through generations of mentors and friends at the camp where I worked last summer.

What’s more, it’s only easily accessible by horseback.

Every time I think about the pines, I can picture clearly as if I was standing there - the trees reach impossibly high, the lower three-quarters of the trunks unbranched where needles can’t get enough sunlight to grow. The trunks are capped with crowns of green boughs. On a calm day in August, I can picture how the sunlight streams through the domed branches of the canopy, making soft dapples on the carpet of red-brown needles like sunbeams through a stained glass window. Arranged in their neat rows and tidy aisles, the trees feel like church pews. To cross the threshold is to enter an entirely different atmosphere. In awe of the beauty and the power, you assume an almost compulsory silence - it feels as if you’re miles away from any form of civilization and there’s no reason you would ever want to return.

Cathedral Pines. I don’t think anyone knows exactly who named it or when it was named, but it’s been called that for at least 30 years. To tell the name to someone who has never been feels almost sacrilegious, like I’m giving away a piece of something that never belonged to me.

“Cathedral,” as it’s known, is about an hour ride each way from camp. Staff don’t lead campers that far out, and even if we did, the trail isn’t marked or maintained. It’s common to wander, slightly lost, through the meadow for a few minutes or get side-tracked on a parallel deer path on the way. There is no map, no hints in the staff manual. The knowledge of how to get from camp to Cathedral is very much stored within people, passed down through stories, kept alive by those who pass it on to others. Unlike many of the funds of knowledge that I possess, this one is precious because it can’t be found anywhere outside of the minds of a few dozen horse-loving women.

At camp, the riding staff works harder and longer hours than any other staff. We get dirty, we do heavy lifting, we shout, we teach, we get injured, we deal with the emotional burden that comes when people can't understand that these magnificent creatures which we love and they ride are living, sentient beings. Making the trek to Cathedral is a reward for all the hard work, a guaranteed moment of peace and reverence filled with the things you love most in the world: your horses and your fellow riding staffers.

One doesn’t usually get to ride to Cathedral until they’ve worked on staff for a few weeks, but as an enthusiastic sixteen year old camping during a session with low riding interest, I had the privilege of joining the riding staff (my role models and idols) on a ride to Cathedral Pines in 2019. I remember how the staff were so excited, how honored I was to be deemed worthy of joining on such a special ride. I remember how I followed curiously but trustingly as the path became narrower, how it felt like the longest ride of my life. I remember how my mind exploded with wonder as we turned the corner into that first row of pines and entered the cathedral. The feeling of crossing the threshold for the first time is impossible to forget and impossible to replicate. It was the most magical thing I’ve ever experienced.

That first journey to Cathedral Pines solidified my path to becoming one of the horsewomen of camp - I had to get the job, if only to return to that sacred place. And I did, in the summer of 2022 when I turned 19. Just a few years post-Covid, it was camp’s first year back at full capacity. It was also the summer of an entirely new-to-camp riding staff, meaning there would’ve been nobody to show us Cathedral Pines had I not taken my first trip there as a camper.

Halfway through the summer on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, armed with a messily sketched map based on aerial photos from Google Earth, my own hazy memory, and dumb luck, one other staffer and I set out to find Cathedral Pines. Long story short, we did - in record time.

Entering the stand on that first return trip to Cathedral Pines felt like coming home. Not only had I used my knowledge to find the stand, I was passing that knowledge on to someone else for the first time, and I could feel the magic in a whole new way.

The funny thing about Cathedral is once you arrive, there’s not really much to do. Usually, you walk your horses reverently through the pines, murmuring words of veneration to your companions as you watch the sunlight filter through the trees. Maybe you take a picture.

Then, you turn around and go home.

As beautiful as the trees are, the magic of Cathedral Pines is not really in the place, but the knowledge of how to get there. The right to make the journey is something you earn, days and weeks before you set out. Just knowing about it connects you to a lineage of people you’ve never met, wise older “sisters” who were once just confused young adults like you.

Following in anticipation, getting lost in the meadow, trotting through the ferns, galloping under a clear blue sky, leading the way for the first time, rallying the other staffers to go for “just a quick ride” after a long day of work: that journey is thousands of times more valuable than the destination.

And that sweetness of keeping the secret, that satisfaction when you find the next worthy horse girl to pass it on to? Of all the feelings in the world, those are priceless.